Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Ivan had never known that kind of childish freedom until he came face-to-face with Grandmother. And then, he’d understood it down to the bone. As he understood that Soleil would one day grow to have that same calm presence, that same warm steel to her. He’d caught glimpses of it already in her determination to find the person she sought … and in her tenderness with him, a man who was nothing to her.
Now she folded her arms. “You’re right,” she admitted in a grudging tone. “But I don’t know if I’ll be able to find the scent outside.” She went to thread her hand through her hair, pulled back when she remembered the braid. “Whatever happens, I’ll get an answer tonight.” Fierce, implacable will. “Even if that means I go up to their door and knock.”
“What’s your plan B?” Ivan always had a plan B, and he’d come up with one for her if needed. “If you don’t find what you’re looking for?”
“My original aim was to kill Lucas Hunter.”
Soleil didn’t know why she’d blurted that out. She kept on crossing lines with Ivan, but it didn’t feel like crossing lines. It felt natural, as if they’d known each other in another lifetime.
A deep pang, skirts whipping around her legs as she ran through a forest while laughing and looking back at someone who was chasing her. She wasn’t scared. She was exhilarated, playful.
Ivan’s voice snapped the gauzy thread, the images fading into gray. “Your original aim? Has it changed?”
She squeezed her eyes shut, rubbed a fist over her heart. “It was a ridiculous aim from the start. Grief-crazy thinking. I could never take him out.”
“If you could, would you?”
Soleil shook her head, accepting the truth that Farah had been urging her toward from day one. “I saw who he is to so many people on that street yesterday. I felt the connections that bind him to countless others.” A burn in her eyes. “How could I, as a healer, end his life knowing that the flow-on effect would be catastrophic?”
Opening her eyes, she dashed away tears. “This city is stable. DarkRiver is stable. If I hurt him, I betray all it means to be a healer—but if I do nothing, I can’t live with myself. So I’ve decided.”
She stared straight ahead. “If I don’t get the answer I want tonight, if it’s all a dream created by grief, I’ll confront him. Ask him why.”
She could feel Ivan’s attention as he waited for her to tell him the rest, but Soleil couldn’t speak. She hadn’t spoken to anyone about the loss of her pack, about all the dead, all the blood. And now, today, when she parted her lips, all that came out was silence. While inside her head played two cubs in the grass. They’d been so mischievous, so intent on creeping up on her and pouncing.
She’d always known they were there, of course, their small bodies making the grass rustle as they crept along on their stomachs. But she’d pretended to be startled, pretended to fall back onto the grass as they “attacked” her. Such small, warm bodies wriggling on top of her in excitement at having made a successful hunt.
She’d growled and grabbed them close to her chest, and they’d nuzzled at her.
Her hand lifted to her cheek, the echo of their small furry faces against her an almost tactile sensation. Her throat closed, the knot of grief in her chest expanding until it filled every part of her.
She could barely breathe, each inhale jagged shards in her lungs. So when that silvery web shimmered into her mind, stronger, thicker, even more dazzling, she grabbed hold of it, wrapped it around her like a glittering blanket, and used it as a shield against the grief.
It tasted of Ivan. Of course it did.
And somehow, in the strange comfort offered by the beautiful stone frost of the man who’d saved her life and now thought he had rights to it, she found her voice. “My pack is dead. SkyElm is dead.”
“There were survivors.”
“Yes, seven survivors—and me.”
Ivan didn’t question the way she voiced that, simply listened.
“A human neighbor told me after I finally remembered myself and came home.” She’d learned of Monroe’s rejection by then, but she hadn’t come back for her erstwhile alpha. “The neighbor had lived next to the pack a long time.” So long that even Monroe had accepted him.
“Only seven,” she murmured, her heart breaking all over again. “But it was more than none. It was enough for us to start again. Then …” She exhaled on a full-body shudder. “Then they all vanished one night, and when the neighbor went looking, he found blood in the aerie that belonged to my former alpha.”
Still, she had hoped. Knowing who Monroe had been, she hadn’t been surprised that he’d ended in blood. “After seeing the blood, our neighbor got in touch with a nonpredatory changeling he knew from his work. That person picked up the scent of a leopard.”